


memento mori

by heartcondition



Category: SEVENTEEN (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Pacific Rim Fusion, Ambiguous Relationships, An Eye Injury, Blood, M/M, Memory, Non-Linear Narrative, Pacrim Typical Violence/Injury, Several Tender Emotions, Some Other SVTs Pop Up, kind of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-13
Updated: 2018-04-13
Packaged: 2019-04-22 07:01:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14303382
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heartcondition/pseuds/heartcondition
Summary: In Nagasaki where the lights never go out and the sea won’t stop spitting out monsters, Joshua looks at Soonyoung, and Soonyoung looks back.





	memento mori

**Author's Note:**

> the Plan:  
> 1\. write a really nonsensical pacrim au thats not action packed or coherent  
> 2\. profit (?)
> 
> as always unbeta'd by anyone other than me skimming it at 4am on a thursday and also completely forced out of me despite the writers block of the century, please forgive any mistakes... i love pacrim but am by no means an Expert so suspend your disbelief re: the inaccuracies this probably contains due to the assumptions ive made abt things....lol
> 
> also you probably need a relatively solid working knowledge of pacrim to read this....however this is extremely non canon...lets pretend trespasser tore up LA instead of san fran....also theres one made up kaiju name because i Had to
> 
>  
> 
> enjoy ( i hope ) !!!!!!

 

 

 

Rogue Atlas disappears from the LOCCENT tracking system somewhere off the coast of Alaska.

“Rangers?” Jeonghan says into the comms, electric and blue in mission control’s dashboard glow. “Are you there?”

 

/

 

Soonyoung’s back hits the mats.

His vision rattles, air scraping out from his lungs, and the room is too quiet. Joshua has a knee pressed down on Soonyoung’s chest, his silhouette haloed by the overhead lights, outlines in bright white, burning in Soonyoung’s eyes when he struggles beneath the weight. In Soonyoung’s hands, the smooth red wood of his own staff is pressed against Joshua’s throat, and sweat from his hair drips onto his forehead, sliding down his temple and onto the mats. If he tips his head back, he’ll see that the rest of his graduating class is staring.

Junhui calls out the score, but Soonyoung’s been holding it in his chest for the past ten minutes now; three to three. Points gained neatly, one after the other.

Joshua removes his knee from Soonyoung’s sternum, eyes flicking up towards the Marshall and back again. Soonyoung levels the stare, putting a face to a name he’s heard properly hundreds of times over lunch tables in the academy, seen flashing across simulator screens.

Back in Kodiak, the rumor mill is alive with half-truths. Between recruits, stories twisted and turned ugly; even tales of the most awarded pilots ballooned three times in size— _did you hear that_ — _did you know that_ —

What Soonyoung knows about Ranger Joshua Hong is this; he’s still holding on to the highest sim scores two years post graduation, though things start getting a little fuzzier around the absolutely abysmal drift compatibility ratings. Rumor has it he got relegated to K-watch while the PPDC waited out the cadet that would match his clean drop to kill ratio, and he’s been there ever since. Eyeing him now, Soonyoung guesses that it’s at least somewhat true, going by the K-science uniform Joshua peeled himself out of before he stepped onto the Kwoon Room’s mats, the upper half of which is now crumpled haphazardly on the bare concrete floor.

Soonyoung sits up, letting his staff fall to the floor. In the harsh light, Joshua sits back on his heels, feet tucked neatly beneath him.

“Well,” Junhui says, scribbling something down on his clipboard, gold stars from Seungcheol’s shoulder reflecting light in abstract patterns on his face. “Looks like we’ve found our co-pilot.”

 

/

 

When Soonyoung comes to, the immediate universe is shaded in hues of flashing reds and blues, the back of his helmet is digging sharply into the base of his skull, and the framework of it split clean down the middle. His visor is shattered, splitting his vision into fragmented shapes. In and out of the drift, pain is different; the way it bends, ghosts, separates the mind from the body—

The second the neural bridge collapses completely, Soonyoung feels it, like jerking awake, a dream where you’re falling and then you actually hit the ground. Beyond the burning in his scar, searing all down the line of his spine, Soonyoung yanks himself out of the motion rig, part of his drive suit breaking off, unmoving as its still geared in to the conn-pod.

“Joshua—” he says, tearing his helmet off, the broken glass cutting across his cheekbone with the motion of it, stumbling forward, feeling suffocated by the collar of the drive suit. “Are you—”

 _Alive,_ is the end of that question, but in truth, Soonyoung would know if Joshua was dead. Even outside of an active neural handshake, the two of them work like a radio you can’t turn off; there’s no way to stop speaking when it’s the whole body that listens.

Still geared into the motion rig, Joshua’s head lifts up, face obscured by the crack in his helmet’s glass, and he makes a pained sound, though its swallowed up by the emergency alarms blaring, the intrusive whir of the core shutting itself down.

“Hey,” Soonyoung says, so quiet, slipping Joshua’s helmet up and off of his head, watching his slightly overgrown bangs fall back into his eyes, the half consciousness that flashes across his face. “Hyung, hey.”

Across the drift, Soonyoung feels a phantom pain blooming in his arm, searing down his spine; a collapsed wire has split open the bicep of Joshua’s drive suit and sliced into his arm, and the spinal clamps are victims of fragile science, finicky, faulty, frazzling apart. Soonyoung’s got the scar to prove it, got the scar to know.

Manually unlocking Joshua’s suit from the rig is a slow and arduous task; the whole thing is designed to hold fast through just about the force of anything, and it’s hard to keep from jostling his injured arm. When the final lock comes undone, Joshua’s weight pitches forward into Soonyoung, fast enough that he almost doesn't catch him.

“Sorry,” Joshua says, his voice scraping like stone against earth into the shell of Soonyoung’s ear. “Dizzy. Can’t see.”

“You’ve got blood in your eyes,” Soonyoung replies, arm snaking around to Joshua’s lower back, holding him closer, tighter. He presses their temples together, then leans back to ask, “do you still have feeling in your arm?”

“Hurts,” Joshua scrapes out, leaning further on Soonyoung, the weight of his body heavy and disoriented. The back of Joshua’s drive suit is still hot to the touch, the spinal clamp likely burning a geometric pattern into the smooth plane of Joshua’s skin, the scar it will leave identical to Soonyoung’s own.

“Can you stand?” Soonyoung asks, voice tight. His body aches in strange places, joints sore from the whiplash they sustained at the end of the fall. “We’ve got to reconnect with LOCCENT.”

 

/

 

Joshua and Soonyoung get to know each other the way most pilots who are strangers do; long afternoons in the Kwoon Room, each fight won and lost like the mat is a board for chess, step by step. Joshua gets blisters on his palms from handling a staff again; usually by night time they’ve cracked and bled out, stained his hands like dark fruit, slightly red and sticky.

Joshua has never looked like much, Soonyoung supposes, in or out of a drivesuit, but he holds his own on the mats with Soonyoung in a way he finds slightly mesmerizing, defensive but heavy handed, the crack of wood against wood an ear splitting sound, always too close to ever be comfortable. Occasionally, Minghao and Mingyu will join them, shrugging out of their faded red jackets, _Havoc Zero_ emblazoned across the backs in blocky white letters to spar.

Laughing, Joshua trips Soonyoung up, takes him down in one swift swipe to his ankle, and points the end of his staff between Soonyoung eyes. He goes a little cross eyed trying to get a look at it.

“Six to six,” Joshua says, and Soonyoung stares up at him from the ground; the drape of the old cadet uniform off the line of his hips, dark blue cargo all the way down, the dull glint of his dog tags as they disappear beneath the collar of his shirt, Soonyoung’s own still un-updated where they hang from his neck.

“You know,” Soonyoung says finally, breathless, leaning up on his elbows, “you’re not what I expected at all.”

“Really?” Joshua grins, a half moon smile, and Soonyoung hates that he’s clever like this, likes it, loves it, the lines start getting blurred. “You’re exactly what I expected, Kwon Soonyoung. Jeonghan let me see your file the day you arrived here.”

“That bastard,” Soonyoung groans, laughing, flopping back down to the floor. “What was the corps thinking, keeping you busy in K-watch all this years?”

“Biding their time,” Joshua muses. “Waiting for you.”

Like this, Soonyoung places his hand in Joshua’s open, offered palm. Says, _well I’m here now._ Gets pulled firmly upwards. Just looks at him.

Just fits.

 

/

 

“We’ve got escape hatches in the shoulders, right?”

Joshua nods, leaned up against the control panel beneath the shattered HUD, one hand against his pulse, the other pressing at his left eye, pained. “They might have locked if the electricity is down.”

“I’m gonna,” Soonyoung starts, feeling a little lightheaded, placing his hand down on a pipe to right his sway, “I’m gonna check outside and see if I can figure out where we are.” As far as Soonyoung knows, Rogue Atlas fell face down into the Alaskan tundra, and he should be able to walk right out from their misaligned conn-pod into the newly forming banks of snow. Night has fallen, and it will feel like crawling from one darkness into another.

“It might be better to call Kodiak,” Joshua says, one eye scrunched closed. Blood has streaked down the dirtied white plating of his drivesuit from the gash in his arm, and Soonyoung stares at it, feeling the phantom ache again. “I think we’re closer. Did J-tech get rid of our beacons?”

“No idea. Weren’t you there when they built this jaeger?”

“You say that like you don’t know firsthand I spent all my time in Nagasaki staring down magnetic reading charts from the breach.”

Soonyoung laughs, the sound of it loud and full like bicycles with bells in the suburbs at midnight, pealing through the remnants of the conn-pod. “You’re right. I’ll go and come back.”

 

/

 

“Initiating neural handshake,” Jeonghan says, voice warbled through the comms. Soonyoung’s drivesuit still sits all wrong, having only been fitted for it yesterday, and Joshua was jumpy as J-tech crew dressed them, the screws making it feel a little bit like crawling into a coffin. “Ready in three, two…”

The first thing Soonyoung registers is darkness. The kind where you can’t see your own hand an inch in front of your face, blue-black, impossible dark. Without warning, the whole thing warps and whirls like a carousel, memories flickering by; the red glow of Soonyoung’s night light as seen from the hiding place beneath his childhood bed, darkness, Soonyoung’s face in a smudgy bathroom mirror, darkness, Soonyoung on his knees, darkness—

He opens his eyes to a burning pain he cant get away from, the spinal clamp of his drivesuit pressed to his skin, searing it, falling out of the motion rig onto the floor, only to find Joshua there as well, tearing his helmet off, chest heaving.

Jeonghan’s voice cuts in over the comms again as the J-tech crew rushes in with a couple of medics in tow.

“Your levels spiked and dropped out there,” he says. Someone starts unscrewing Soonyoung’s spinal clamp, removing the plates on his chest, his shoulders, his back. His head hurts. His heart races. Joshua looks away.

“Joshua,” Jeonghan starts again, and Soonyoung watches him close his eyes, get his vitals checked by the med crew, “you’ve gotta let go. Soonyoung, that was nice and steady on your end. We’ll get J-tech to look at the electromyography in your circuitry suit when you’re back from the med bay.”

With help to get him standing, Soonyoung gets walked to the hospital wing with half the plates of his drivesuit totally gone, circuitry suit torn open and pooled at his hips, and two things trailing behind him: the first being the smell of burning flesh, and the second being Joshua Hong.

Face down on a stiff hospital bed, Soonyoung turns his head to the side to breathe more easily, wishing drifting was as easy as sparring, as familiar as the idea is in his head.

Joshua avoids Soonyoung’s eye, still holding his helmet in his hands, the angles of his drivesuit preventing him from getting comfortable where he leans against the wall. _I didn’t see anything,_ Soonyoung wants to say to him, knowing the biggest preventers of smooth drifting are embarrassment and shame, though he’s not sure what the point would be when it’s Soonyoung that wants to see, when it’s Soonyoung that needs to.

“I’m sorry,” Joshua says eventually, watching Soonyoung wince as a medic peels off layers of burnt skin from his back. “I should’ve—” he starts, the pauses for a long time. Soonyoung waits. Wonders what’s hiding in all that memorized darkness.

“It’s fine,” Soonyoung replies, though it feels a bit like having two conversations at once. “It’s not like you’re the one who wired my drivesuit, anyway.”

 

/

 

Soonyoung watches the HUD screen glitch and fade out, lets Joshua do the talking while he tries to find some way to connect to any signals, so much of their tech destroyed, overheated and broken.

“We’re stranded,” Joshua says into the comms, but the sounds doesn’t catch at all. “Rogue Atlas is totalled, we’re gonna need medics, and we can’t get in touch with our home base’s mission control.”

Radio silence.

“Kodiak,” Joshua says desperately. “Kodiak, do you read me?”

“Hyung—”

“Dammit,” Joshua hisses. He drops his face into his hands, and his arm is still bleeding like a sieve down the line of his forearm, dripping to the floor.

A minute passes, then two. Even the backup radio is broken, functioning a lot like the locked vault of oldest memories; nothing comes in, and no one gets out.

Soonyoung comes closer, puts his hands down gently on Joshua’s shoulders. They can’t be too far from where the kaiju ripped out whatever powers their GPS tracking system at the very end of the fight, but soon the cold will set in, their blood will bleed out, and if no one comes fast enough—well. Soonyoung thinks they might die.

 

/

 

Beneath the shatterdome, the residence hall is quiet. Soonyoung returns to his shared room with Joshua, fresh out from the showers, shaking his hair out like a wet dog.

“Soonyoung,” Joshua says immediately, the second he opens the door. “I have to—ah, come here—I have to show you something.”

There’s a box on his lap, one he recognizes from beneath Joshua’s bed when he moved into this room with him, dust collected in a thin layer on its lid.

“Sorry,” Joshua says anxiously, eyeing the floor. “It’ll just—make drifting easier. For me. If you’ve already seen.”

Soonyoung walks in, and he closes the door.

 

/

 

“Can I look at your eyes?” Soonyoung says, crouching in front of Joshua, the floor still residually warm from contact with the electric core. Joshua blinks and nods, tilts his chin up with the light touch of Soonyoung’s hand along his jawline, the other beneath his brow, pulling his eyelid up the most gentle way he can.

“It’s just blood, right?” Joshua ventures, feeling himself grin morbidly, other eye scrunching up with the beginnings of crows feet. In his corneas, blood has pooled in the irises, blocked out his pupils more than just part of the way, made his vision blurry, made it dark.

“Looks like hyphemas,” Soonyoung says a little absently, wishing there was better light. He lets Joshua close his eyes again, lashes fanning out as they go. “Remember? Jihoon and Wonwoo used to get ‘em all the time back when Voodoo Foxtrot still had a nuclear core.”

Joshua holds on to Soonyoung’s forearm as he slides to the ground beside him, each joint pressed against another in a neat, single row; hips, elbows, knees. Time passes, and Soonyoung listens to the howling of the wind and snow through the cracks in Rogue Atlas’ exterior.

“If my eyes are ruined,” Joshua says eventually, his head tipped sideways against Soonyoung's own, “you should butt in and pilot with those guys in Voodoo.”

“No way,” Soonyoung laughs, though it makes his body ache. “Purple’s not really my top pick in terms of color, and I’ve got no interest in finding out what goes on inside of either of those idiot's heads.” His skin itches, the scar down his back growing uncomfortable inside the circuitry suit. “Don’t freak out. We’re gonna be fine.”

The gash in Joshua’s arm has clotted and stopped bleeding for the most part, but he holds his hand over the wound, anyway, afraid it might burst open again, bleed him dry. “It’s the apocalypse, Soonyoung,” he says. “I feel like I’m allowed to be a little frantic.”

 

/

 

In the drivesuit room, it’s quiet. The assembly of each part is a seamless routine to their personal J-tech crew; circuitry, then plating, spinal clamp, screws. In the shatterdome, the kaiju alarm has been silenced. It only needs to ring for one minute or so for everyone to know, the echo of it hanging in all the wide open spaces. The hallway to the conn-pod never feels quite long enough.

“Rogue Atlas,” Jeonghan says into the comms. “You’re all set up. Let’s drift. We need you.”

Joshua holds an arm of the motion rig like it’s a handle hanging from the ceiling of a bus, breath fogging the glass of his helmet as he stares across the space at Soonyoung. The HUD flashes to life.

“After this—” Soonyoung starts, stops, “If it’s what you want, after this, I won’t ask.” Joshua nods, looks up at the cross hatch of wires that make up the ceiling, tries to find meaning in them. Find escape. “I’ll never ask. I won't tell.”

Joshua locks his feet into the motion rig, his side of the conn-pod blinking to life, the whole room now electric, burning blue.

_Neural handshake in ten, nine…_

Soonyoung breathes deep as the PONS system buzzes to life inside his helmet, electric, humming.

“Don’t chase the RABIT,” Joshua says. His voice sounds different filtered through the comm.

_Eight, seven, six..._

Soonyoung laughs, head thrown back, hearing it ring through the radio system that runs through the whole base. “That’s real funny, coming from you.”

_Five, four, three…_

“If we live, we can talk about it. You’re gonna be inside my head. It’s no use.”

_Two…_

What color is a memory?

_One…_

In Soonyoung’s eyes, the world blurs and then blackens, washing out into painful, poisonous, brilliant kaiju blue. It switches. Swirls. Turns dark, again. Red nightlights. Red light. Red light. Red light.

_Neural link, holding steady._

 

/

 

Joshua turns his head to face Soonyoung, though his irises are still dark and crimson with blood, knowing where Soonyoung is by sound, mind, memory alone. “You remember your night light?” he says.

“The red one? ‘Course I do.”

 _Remember_ is a halfway accurate use of the word—it’s Soonyoung’s memory, but it’s plastered itself inside Joshua’s head now, too, so familiar and tactile that it might as well be his own.

When Soonyoung was a child, his mother used to wake each morning to find him asleep underneath his bed, heart a little frazzled during the split second she saw his empty blankets, the dim room lit eerily by the hazy red glow. Every day, it was the same routine; crouching down and waking him up, telling the same joke, the colored light reflected backwards in the darks of Soonyoung’s irises. _Be your own monster,_ or something like that. It got less funny when Sabrejaw came screaming from the ocean, and Soonyoung lived just far enough outside the city that the gap beneath his bed felt like the smartest place to hide.

“When we first drifted, I thought that memory was mine,” Joshua says, blinking unseeingly, head tilted back to lean against the busted HUD screen. “It was dark, with that red light, and the sound of footsteps. I thought it was—” he swallows. “Well. But that’s why I spiked and dropped out. I didn’t chase the RABIT. I ran.”

Soonyoung breathes in against the pain that’s slow blooming in his body, now that the adrenaline’s worn off, feels Joshua’s thoughts shimmer and shake out across the ghost of the drift. He searches out his hand on the shattered floor between them, and holds it.

“Those memories are what my vision looks like, right now. Just—dark. Hints of red. No blue. I keep thinking about it.” Joshua pulls his knees up, places his chin on the clunky material that’s covering them. “But that first time, when I dropped out and your clamp short circuited, I never told you.”

Soonyoung smiles, lightheaded, turning Joshua’s palm over in his hand. He’s got internal bleeding somewhere, and he knows it, feels it inside the cage of his ribs, aching in his back.

“I really never told you,” Joshua repeats. “I wanted to forget.”

The information isn’t new, to Soonyoung. Not really. He put the pieces together a long time ago, doing drops with him in Los Angeles, Sydney, Tokyo. Back then, it all went right through him—Soonyoung had no idea how Joshua was doing it, just love, love, love, until he was tired enough to close his eyes, love that comes from pain and never the other way around, how he never tried to choose a more boring life. “You never told me,” Soonyoung says. He takes Joshua’s hand and puts it to his slowing pulse; two conversations, always, again. “You never told me, but I knew.”

 

/

 

In the heart of Rogue Atlas with Joshua, it was like this; loose change in Soonyoung’s ears, a frozen river, burning in his heart like peeling back the skin of citrus fruits. It was his vision dipped into phosphorescent kaiju blue, Joshua’s face reflected backwards in the convex mirror of a dark drift sim screen, the unbearable pain of space being forced open to make room for a memory.

The thing about drifting is that it’s less like knowing someone well and more like becoming them, if ever so briefly, like walking into a room and realizing you had what you were there for already, and then after that, it was still like that, only all the time.

In the pinwheel of memory, it’s Soonyoung cutting his hair over the basin of a sink, Joshua’s temple against the window of a bumpy, dusty schoolbus, thin hands, slow hearts, a glance, a look, a mouth—

In total darkness, Joshua Hong, nine years old, lays flat on his back as the sky starts turning red through the gaps in collapsed concrete above him. His vision colors, shade by shade; scarlet, crimson, ruby, rose.

For a while, theres nothing. Then footsteps. Sets of them. A triangle of light opens up to an even redder, sunrise sky, opens into three faces, so shocked to find Joshua alive that when he looks back, he thinks maybe he’s the only survivor that rescue team had found in the waste all day. Around him, his house is in split into ragged edged pieces, flattened to the ground. As the sun rises, Joshua picks through the wreckage, collecting fragments, old photos. The world is chalky with the feeling of concrete that’s been crushed, and the air acrid with the smell of Kaiju blood, rivers of it leaking across the landscape. When Joshua shakes off his belongings, the grime catches and swirls in the sun.

Inside of Soonyoung, the memory pulls together in little pieces; curled edges of old photos, stained by acidic Kaiju blue, stones crunching underfoot, the breeze off of the water, loneliness like a unbroken fever, the kind of heat that knows exactly where to kill.

A box, kicked beneath a bunk bed, stuffed with wisps of a memory, of a childhood; things that just stay with him. Things he keeps like time, like language, like dreams.

Always. Even when he sleeps.

 

/

 

“Soonyoung,” Joshua says, toeing the edge of desperate, reaching blindly for Soonyoung’s sides, his elbows, shoulders, “help me help you up.” The sound of a helicopter has crept ever closer as the seconds tick by, and Joshua imagines the blades are blowing snow through the cracked frame of Rogue Atlas towards them as it descends from the sky. “We gotta get you home.”

Home being anywhere but here, mostly. Nagasaki, maybe, though they’ve been doing stints at Anchorage before it completely gets shut down. Home meaning to safety.

Soonyoung says nothing, but Joshua feels the puff of air Soonyoung holds in and lets out as he pulls him up, slings Soonyoung’s arm around his shoulder, reaching around to hold him by the hip.

“Heavy,” Joshua teases, pushing forward to take a step. He’s only got the vaguest idea of which direction to go to get outside; following bursts of sound and wind instead of his vision, trusting that Soonyoung will guide them forward towards the snow.

“It’s ‘cause I’m full of blood,” Soonyoung says. It’s a joke that doesn’t land, and Joshua ignores it, holding Soonyoung tighter, feeling a burning in his arm when the muscles catch and flex.

 _To the left,_ Joshua hears, and it takes too long to figure out if Soonyoung said it or thought it, just takes that step forward into a circle of brilliant white light. It’s the searchlight, Joshua realized belatedly, feeling Soonyoung’s head fall back onto his arm as he looks up. His vision burns pink and orange through the blood and bright light.

The helicopter lands, quietly on dead ice from the sea.

 

/

 

Soonyoung smothers his wet hair with a towel he took from the decontamination showers, drying it out. His heart is still racing from the thrill of a fight, of drifting completely, he and Joshua could only shout at each other in vain across the drivesuit room as they were stripped of their uniforms and segued into separate rooms, keeping precaution against kaiju blue.

Speaking aloud felt so strange without a private room inside their heads; Soonyoung stared at Joshua’s mouth forming words as J-tech buzzed like gnats around him and didn’t hear a thing

The shower water was so hot that it stung, made him lightheaded with all the steam, and he stumbles into the next room to pull on his fatigues; soon he and Joshua will be ushered out into a press conference announcing their official piloting debut.

As soon as Soonyoung sees him, the memories; they come back. Crawl back. It’s easy to recall the tentative feeling of wanting to kiss, be kissed, say more, spell it out, all of it reflected backwards across two bodies and minds, even easier to close that distance without saying a word.

What happens is; Soonyoung kisses Joshua, or maybe the other way around, and it's a kiss like something killed every night, resurrected every morning, the certainty of it tangible, breakable like ice.

After all, that’s just the thing about bodies and brains; you bandage another broken wrist, learn to live with things not working the same way ever again—just because it healed doesn’t mean you can’t remember what it felt like to shatter, shake, rattle and roll, what it felt like to search the ruins for anything worth saving. What it felt like to be the thing worth saving.

 

In Nagasaki where the lights never go out and the sea won’t stop spitting out monsters, Joshua looks at Soonyoung, and Soonyoung looks back. Easily, the knowledge of him settles quietly in Soonyoung’s heart.

A little bit like dust.

 

/

 

“Hyung,” Soonyoung says, slightly frantic, the medic frowning as she monitors his ever descending blood pressure, laid flat across a stretcher in the back of the helicopter. “What if I die?”

The chopper shakes as it careens through wind around them, the sound of it pervasive, bursting in Joshua’s ears, making him feel like he’s just been tossed into the air, no parachute. Free fall. Across the drift, he can feel Soonyoung looking at him, straight up from below. Joshua taps his temple, eyes burning.  “I’ll keep you right here,” he says. “I’ll keep you in my chest.”

One of Soonyoung’s hands comes down over Joshua’s, holding it. Joshua ignores the sound of the medics assessing Soonyoung’s deteriorating health over the radio in the front of the cabin, waiting as one unscrews pieces of his drivesuit to get a better listen on his heart. Soonyoung’s breathing rattles, and Joshua tries to forget that lungs are just so much empty space inside of us. How hollow we are.

“Soonyoung,” Joshua says, blindly reaching for his face, shouting above the noise, just to be heard. “If you die, I’ll keep all your photos in a box under my bed, that no one’s allowed to ask me about, ever.”

Soonyoung’s grip tightens. “You’ll need a bigger box.”

Joshua laughs, the radio crackling back to life again over the speakers. They can’t be far from Kodiak now, or the much needed medical attention, and he fits his fingers between the grooves of Soonyoung’s broken drivesuit. Wishes he could run his fingers down the familiar blueprint of Soonyoung’s spinal clamp scar. “Okay,” Joshua says. He wants the blood out of his eyes so he can get a look at Soonyoung’s smile. “I’ll get a bigger box.”

The wind keeps screaming but after a while it just becomes white noise. In the illusion of silence, Joshua’s memories surge forward: the line of Soonyoung’s shoulders, strong and sturdy in the Kwoon Room’s unreliable light, the clean colors of  Rogue Atlas, swirling and searching through the night, red light, sunrise, the haunting, incredible bass boom of Kaiju against screaming metal in the dark, how the darkness became less dark, Soonyoung’s knees, the back of his neck, his body adjusting to the cold spots in bed, pounds of feeling, his face unforgettable blue in their jaeger’s start up lights—

“Stop thinking so much,” Soonyoung says. Joshua’s hand searches out his chest, lays it steady over his heart. All around, the sound of the helicopter whir pitches down, stomach dropping as it lands on the roof of Kodiak Jaeger Academy, bleached white in the wash of Alaskan snow. Soonyoung won’t let go of him. Joshua feels like he needs to be checked for arthritis of the heart before he blurts out an _I love you_ in front of Kodiak’s entire medical team and crew.

“For the record,” says Soonyoung, quiet over the staccato beat of a gurney being unfolded, reassembled, “I’d want someone to ask you about the box.”

Which is to say; you can let go of the past, Joshua.

Which is to say; there will be other stories to tell.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> (staring at snshua tag) THIS IS SO SAD meme
> 
> as always thanks to the tl who patiently put up with my twt ramblings and poor time management skills re: writing, you are all braver than the marines. special shout out to izzy who puts up with more of my bullshittery than anyone. smooch
> 
> feel free to come find me on twitter @hochitown !! (if its on private, follow reqs are ok!! im not picky lol)


End file.
